page_title: Betamax
section_title: Home and professional recording
hierarchical_section_title: Betamax / Home and professional recording
caption_attribution_description: English: Betamax cassettes on display at the 80s Museum at SM City BF Parañaque. Taken on my Lenovo smartphone.
context_page_description: Betamax is a consumer-level analog-recording and cassette format of magnetic tape for video. It was developed by Sony and was released in Japan on May 10, 1975. The first Betamax device introduced in the United States was the LV-1901 console, which included a 19-inch color monitor, and appeared in stores in early November 1975. The cassettes contain 0.50-inch-wide videotape in a design similar to that of the earlier, professional 0.75-inch-wide, U-matic format. Betamax is obsolete, having lost the videotape format war to VHS. Despite this, Betamax recorders would not be discontinued until 2002, while new Betamax cassettes were available until March 2016, when Sony stopped making and selling them, alongside MicroMV.
  Like the rival videotape format VHS, Betamax has no guard band and uses azimuth recording to reduce crosstalk. According to Sony's history webpages, the name had a double meaning: beta is the Japanese word used to describe the way in which signals are recorded on the tape; and the shape of the lowercase Greek letter beta resembles the course of the tape through the transport. The suffix -max, from the word "maximum", was added to suggest greatness.
context_section_description: One other major consequence of the Betamax technology's introduction to the U.S. was the lawsuit Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984, the "Betamax case"), with the U.S. Supreme Court determining home videotaping to be legal in the United States, wherein home videotape cassette recorders were a legal technology since they had substantial noninfringing uses. This precedent was later invoked in MGM v. Grokster (2005), where the high court agreed that the same "substantial noninfringing uses" standard applies to authors and vendors of peer-to-peer file sharing software (notably excepting those who "actively induce" copyright infringement through "purposeful, culpable expression and conduct").
  For the professional and broadcast video industry, Sony derived Betacam from Betamax. Released in 1982, Betacam became the most widely used videotape format in ENG (electronic news gathering), replacing the .75 in (19 mm) wide U-matic tape format. Betacam and Betamax are similar in some ways: they use the same video cassette shape, use the same oxide tape formulation with the same coercivity, and record linear audio tracks in the same location of the tape. But in the key area of video recording, Betacam and Betamax are completely different. (For details, see the Betacam article.)
  Sony also offered a range of industrial Betamax products, a Beta I-only format for industrial and institutional users. These were aimed at the same market as U-Matic equipment, but were cheaper and smaller. The arrival of Betacam reduced the demand for both industrial Beta and U-Matic equipment.
  Betamax also had a significant part to play in the music recording industry, when Sony introduced its PCM (pulse-code modulation) digital recording system as an encoding box/PCM adaptor that connected to a Betamax recorder. The Sony PCM-F1 adaptor was sold with a companion Betamax VCR SL-2000 as a portable digital audio recording system. Many recording engineers used this system in the 1980s and 1990s to make their first digital master recordings.
  Initially, Sony was able to tout several Betamax-only features, such as BetaScan—a high speed picture search in either direction—and BetaSkipScan, a technique that allowed the operator to see where he was on the tape by pressing the FF key (or REW, if in that mode): the transport would switch into the BetaScan mode until the key was released. This feature is discussed in more detail on Peep Search. Sony believed that the M-Load transports used by VHS machines made copying these trick modes impossible. BetaSkipScan (Peep Search) is now available on miniature M-load formats, but even Sony was unable to fully replicate this on VHS. BetaScan was originally called "Videola" until the company that made the Moviola threatened legal action.
  Sony would also sell a BetaPak, a small deck designed to be used with a camera. Concerned with the need for several pieces and cables to connect them, an integrated camera/recorder was designed, which Sony dubbed a "Camcorder"; the result was Betamovie. Betamovie used the standard-size cassette, but with a modified transport. The tape was wrapped 300° around a smaller, 44.671 mm (1.7587 in)-diameter head drum, with a single dual-azimuth head to write the video tracks. For playback, the tape would be inserted into a Beta-format deck. Due to the different geometry and writing techniques employed, playback within the camcorder was not feasible. SuperBeta and industrial Betamovie camcorders would also be sold by Sony.
caption: Betamax tapes on display at a museum.
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